DALLAS – Anti-abortion activists are reaching aggressively to draw more blacks into their movement, targeting urban communities they long have considered hostile turf.

They are opening crisis pregnancy centers in minority neighborhoods, establishing partnerships with black pastors and distributing leaflets that raise suspicion about Planned Parenthood, a longtime provider of reproductive health care and abortions .

Framing their cause as the new frontier in civil rights – an effort to stop “black genocide” – these activists have turned to revered names in black history. A niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s is touring the nation, speaking out against “the war on the womb.” The great-great-granddaughter of Dred Scott recently compared Roe v. Wade to the 1857 Supreme Court decision bearing her ancestor’s name, a ruling declaring blacks so inferior that they had no rights.

“Often, the inner-city, the immigrant and minority populations are invisible when we think of the whole abortion issue,” said Peggy Hartshorn, president of Heartbeat International, which runs nearly 900 anti-abortion counseling centers across the U.S. – almost all in mostly white suburbs.

The nonprofit launched an initiative last year to stake out a presence in inner cities. Her initial goal is to open three to five crisis pregnancy centers in Miami in the next several years.

The outreach is not a coordinated strategy but a series of projects by independent ministries. Heartbeat focuses on steering one woman at a time away from abortion. The black activist group LEARN tries to rally political outrage by touring colleges with the Genocide Awareness Project – giant murals that juxtapose photos of aborted fetuses with images of slaughter in Rwanda.

A single statistic underlies these efforts: Blacks make up 13 percent of the population but account for 37 percent of abortions in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Liberal groups that support abortion rights – most prominently Planned Parenthood – have spent years building ties with black churches and providing subsidized health care, such as Pap smears and AIDS tests, to poor urban communities.

By contrast, the national anti-abortion movement has largely ignored the inner city. Its energy, funds and volunteers come mostly from “white, suburban, small-town, red-state America,” said the Rev. John Ensor, who runs Heartbeat’s Urban Initiative. That legacy has sown mistrust.

“When you go to African-American communities – even myself, an African-American woman – you’ll find they don’t trust pro-life people,” said Lillie Epps, a vice president of Care Net, which runs 1,000 suburban crisis-pregnancy centers. “They look at us as a group who cares very little about what’s going on in the inner city.”

When LaToya Yarbrough became pregnant six months after her first child was born out of wedlock, she didn’t think anyone at a crisis pregnancy center in the suburbs could understand her situation. “I had this view … that I’d be saying, ‘I can’t afford this, I can’t afford that’ and I’d be looking at (the counselor) and thinking, ‘You can, because you probably have a husband at home who’s a doctor or a lawyer,’ ” she said.

Yarbrough started dialing abortion clinics. At one, a secretary sensed her despair and referred her to Family Care Pregnancy Center, run by a black megachurch in Dallas.

There, Yarbrough met other black women as afraid as she was and black counselors determined to help them find a way to carry their pregnancies to term. She took free classes in prenatal care, child discipline, car-seat safety and spiritual growth. Center director, Jettie Johnson recognized Yarbrough still had postpartum depression from the birth of her first son, Byron, and provided counseling.

Yarbrough’s second son, Joseph, will turn 1 in May.

“Now that I look at him, I wouldn’t care if the counselors were white, Asian, black – they saved his life,” Yarbrough said. “But when I first started out … I wouldn’t have been as comfortable with a white person as I was with Jettie. She looks like me. She knows what I’m going through.”

The Rev. Tony Evans, whose church runs the Family Care facility, has staged national conferences to persuade other black preachers that they can press hard to save lives in the womb without giving up on the traditional, often liberal concerns of the black church.

It’s an uphill struggle. Not only are black pastors often afraid to offend their mostly female congregations, but many have developed close partnerships with abortion-rights supporters.

Planned Parenthood uses the Washington, D.C., affiliate as its template. Executives visit black churches on Sundays and even speak from the pulpits on topics such as HIV testing. President and CEO Jatrice Martel Gaiter holds clinic tours for black ministers, “to show them that their kids will be safe with us.”

Gaiter encourages the perception that the anti-abortion movement is made up of imperious outsiders. As she puts it: “Upper-middle-class, white organizations should not be able to interfere with families in black communities.”

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